During the 1980s, liposuctioned yuppies cared for nothing more than earning their first million and retiring to a plush, careless world before reaching 30. But beneath the avarice, a counter-culture grew dissatisfied.

Director Richard Linklater has settled on directing the angry and discontented, the lost and the wandering.

Capturing a generation which endured New Coke, Ronald Reagan and MTV, Linklater creates a realism that would make John Hughes blush.

With his first major film, Slacker, Linklater presents actors who analyze problems larger then dandruff flakes and girls unwilling to go "all the way."

This pseudo-documentary weaves through different characters all trying to find direction and reason in a world cluttered with fast-paced greed. They live an existence where lollygagging is the major pastime.

"Slacker is an attempt at communication . . . It has a lot of empathy with these people. The film is of these people," Linklater said. "For me it's kind of how I lived for seven years and pretty much continue to live."

Living a slackeresque existence, Linklater seems to talk through a cough-syrupy haze; it's a laid-back drawl that aptly represents his unpretentious lifestyle.

The director's chair didn't feel comfortable before a seven-year stretch of intense film study and experimentation with a Super 8.

"I just started watching three movies a day and fell in love with cinema. I just studied cinema and watched 600 to 700 films a year for years," Linklater said.

When not entrenched in the theater, Linklater made short films. He admits to blushing whenever thinking of his past works.

"Most of them would be considered experimentalist, non-narrative stuff. I guess I was exploring the medium, attacking it," Linklater said. "Throw cameras off buildings, slice it, bake the film, stuff like that. You need to attack the medium, get all that shit out of your system."

For Linklater, Slacker was a refinement of the short films and his first full-length feature, It's Impossible to Plow by Reading Books. In a Kerouacian adventure, Linklater lived on trains for his freshman effort. All the footage was shot within the red, tan and plastic confines of Amtrak.

"It was pretty much a contemplation of travel, there's hardly any dialogue in the movie," Linklater said. "In this movie there's hardly any communication even when they talk. It's tough for me to watch."

As for Slacker, Linklater chose the actors without the bureaucracy of big production casting calls. He simply picked people off the streets of Austin, Texas, that interested him.

Since its early summer release and subsequent run on college campuses, some of those characters have gained notoriety and fame. Notables include the anarchist, the UFO seeker and the woman selling Madonna's pap smear.

According to Linklater, John Slate, who played the JFK assassination buff, has become a smash at conspiracy conventions. Slate said he had different motives for choosing the part than most think.

"I was more then happy to play a character involved with JFK, to play a kook," Slate said. "I'm doing it to be funny."

The scene that has garnered the most attention is the woman and her Madonna pap smear.

"The idea for the pap smear was an old one. I had gotten in a conversation with a guy in a bar in Montana. He was speculating that the future of pornography might be Madonna pap smears," Linklater said. "That always stayed in my mind."

Linklater's next film will center around the last day of high school in 1976. Chronicling a world governed by hall monitors and learner's permits, he promises to transcend hormones and Oxy-10 for the real scoop.

He's currently casting extras for the film, said Ann Walker at the Detour Film Office, if any students are interested.